JW:
Sometimes it's hard to appreciate progress when it happens gradually in your lifetime. For most of its history CBS (Christian Bible Scholarship) had great commercial success subtly resolving translations issues in its favor by simply torturing/killing anyone who publicly opposed. The Church though finally made the great mistake when Martin Luthifer's Pope decided that as long as it was agreed that Church dogma was correct it would tolerate questioning why it was correct. Apparently the pope was out on a youth bender and failed to be on the receiving end of a memo from the hole spirit that once you were into men questioning which position to take (Stephen Carlson look out!) they would inevitably also question whether or not Church dogma was correct. This led to the birth of the opposite of the virgin birth, Skepticism.
Fasting forward to hyper-modern Internet times, CBS assumed that it could use the Internet to advance the goals of Christianity by reaching people they would otherwise not reach who lived in non-Christian environments. Sadly/happily the Internet had the opposite effect, reducing the influence of Christianity in the world. This was because now arguments for things like religious translations could simply be decided by nothing more than the arguments standing by themselves. No longer was the argument won by resorting to the physical or at least the quantity and quality of shouting.
Case in point, modern Christian translations of Isaiah 7:14. For the uninitiated, the Hebrew word there is an unequivocal "young women" but Christian translations have traditionally/dishonestly translated as "virgin". In Polemics this was an historic victory for Counter-Missionaries some time ago but only in relatively recent times have the superior Christian translations confessed their translation sin. And now this:
New Revised Standard Version
7The New Revised Standard Version (NRSV) is an English translation of the Bible published in 1989 by the National Council of Churches. It is a revision of the Revised Standard Version, which was itself an update of the American Standard Version.[2]
NRSV | RSV | ASV |
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Joseph
WOMAN, n.
An animal usually living in the vicinity of Man, and having a
rudimentary susceptibility to domestication. It is credited by
many of the elder zoologists with a certain vestigial docility
acquired in a former state of seclusion, but naturalists of the
postsusananthony period, having no knowledge of the seclusion,
deny the virtue and declare that such as creation's dawn beheld,
it roareth now. The species is the most widely distributed of all
beasts of prey, infesting all habitable parts of the globe, from
Greenland's spicy mountains to India's moral strand. The popular
name (wolfman) is incorrect, for the creature is of the cat kind.
The woman is lithe and graceful in its movement, especially the
American variety (felis pugnans), is omnivorous and can be
taught not to talk.
Skeptical Textual Criticism